


The Girl Who Outran Death

by apparentlytaboo



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mention of Original Characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 20:31:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18557308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparentlytaboo/pseuds/apparentlytaboo
Summary: Some spend their entire lives running from death, but they never stop to wonder what happens if they succeed.or,Jack Harkness isn't the only one the vortex manipulated for life. This is Rose, post Canary Wharf and staring down the barrel of forever.





	The Girl Who Outran Death

Days and months and years

my lover has been buried.

Days and months and years

my children have been cold.

Days and months and years,

how long ‘til I die of a broken heart?

 

Some spend their entire lives running from death, but they never stop to wonder what happens if they succeed. Years ago, on a gloomy beach by a stormy sea I said goodbye to the man I loved, and when I fought my way back again fate simply ripped us back apart, though the second time it was sunny. And in that sunlight, I was given hope in the form of a mortal man, one who would not run away to the stars, would never leave me as his double had, and for a time life was beautiful.

My parents were happy here. Each had learned the hard way how to appreciate having the other in their life, and it showed in every single thing they did for one another. My father was successful, my mother was supportive, Micky was changing the world as a part of Torchwood, and John and I well, we traveled like the vagabonds our hearts will always make us. We loved as we had never loved, and it warmed us despite how relatively small our lives had become. We lived as we had always lived, scouring the entire surface of the earth for all of it’s wonders. Without a magical box, even this small blue planet is too large to see in its entirety in the span of a human lifetime.

Our children knew the world as well; each one born in a different place, always steeped in new cultures, learning another language. Our little family became borderless, picking up ‘strays’ (because John never did master the art of tact) along the way and I believed we were doing something good. Changing lives for the better, erasing little pockets of loneliness one adoption at a time. Our children grew and moved on slowly, finding loves and paths of their own and despite my pride in them, I missed each one terribly. I suppose I know now how my mother had felt each time I left, possibly never to return, and had the grace to feel sorry for it now.

It was on Madagascar, running for our lives through the thick jungle from a cult of cannibals worshiping a golden deity that turned out to be an alien artifact (Indiana Jones has nothing on us) that everything changed. Once the artifact was neutralized and packaged up for Torchwood (Mickey had finally assuaged most of John’s hang ups with the institute) while the dust was still settling, a courier found us with a weathered letter. It had more tracking stamps than available space, some applied right over one another, no doubt chasing us through the continents. A letter from my mother. Pete was sick, had been for a while but they didn’t want to worry us. He was sick, and this letter was months old.

A call back home assured us they were hale and whole and not to worry dear, the worst of it had passed, we didn’t want to worry you lot, out there changing the world! So proud by the way. And how’s John? The kids?

A week later we are bundled in the back of a military transport, the best fit Micky could scrounge up on such short notice, contacting us the moment he had heard, but still; my father was pale and cold when we reached the hospital. There aren’t words for the feeling of this; looking out at your future and knowing this person you loved won’t be a part of it. I feel empty. My mother looks lost. It does not surprise me when she goes, laid in the ground next to him less than a year later.

With every line that traced John’s face from then on, I felt our time together dwindling like a burning candle. For a while I fooled myself into believing it was luck, good genes somehow skipping a generation, maybe the excitement of our life renewing my vitality. But as John’s face begins to weather, I remain unchanged. I love him, will always love him, but for the first time since we came to this dimension, I am truly afraid. The one thing I had always taken for granted was that the Doctor would outlive me.

We have decades of adventures together. Tens of children, both adopted and our own, spread out across the Earth, changing it for the better. It was a good life, and our hearts are still full of one another when his finally stop. I take him to the bay alone. I build a pyre like the ones he told me of on Gallifrey, and watch the ashes drift off into the surf until there is nothing left. I stay staring at the water and feel nothing.

Our children are candle flames in the otherwise darkness of my soul, and I am drawn to them even though I know that they are doomed to fade. The enduring strangeness of their lives has numbed them to impossibility, so when a girl younger than them comes for dinner they do not bat an eye. I am a family friend, a long-lost cousin. When they are old enough, I am simply my grandchildren’s friend from school. I am proud beyond measure of my children, and theirs, but all things end, and the candles begin to go out one by one. It hurts too much to stay and watch the strangers my family are becoming, generations later.

As the seasons pass my heart grows colder. I am lost with nothing but time before me and nothing to fill it with. John Bachar once said that death was a gift. He said that without it, life wouldn’t have meaning. I doubt he ever knew just how right he was.

I live like a machine, isolated in the countryside away from anyone at all. The modern world is full of convenience and it is simple to have anything delivered. Amazon is my only link to the outside world for decades. I eat and sleep and wake and repeat and feel empty as I waste the hours. Bored, I begin to read. In a few years I have accumulated a library to rival any private estate on Earth. After twenty I have run out of book-less rooms. After thirty I am bored of reading, but I am slowly able to think back on what I have lost without it crippling me. There is a twinge of pain, perhaps there always will be, but when a passage reminds me of John or the children, I read aloud and imagine them laughing with me, and my heart no longer breaks.

One morning I think back past Canary Warf and remember the other life I had. I remember the Doctor who, for all I love my husband dearly he was not the same man, shone brighter than anything I have ever seen. I remember Jack and wonder what this gift/curse has made of him, if he is filling his life with better things than my own. I remember them and wonder at their present and smile and dream.

I dream of finding them out there, in the other world, and being part of something again. I dream of people who remember. I dream of people who would understand what I have lost, who could perhaps help me find a future. I dream of home, and somewhere along the line my heart decides that we will find them. The Doctor said it was impossible, but he’d been wrong before. I have forever stretching out before me and a mad dream to fulfill, and for the first time in a long two hundred years I wake up and move with purpose.

The first hole between worlds had been accidental, the TARDIS slipping through the weak spot in the time vortex like punching through a wall of straw. The second had been tougher, a wall of stick, but Micky and his lot had made it through just fine, and later so had I. This wall is made of brick and to knock it down should be impossible; but it hadn’t ever faced _this_ Bad Wolf before.


End file.
